Technical Reports & Notes

This page lists documents with significant internationalization content that are W3C Recommendations or Notes, or are being produced using the formal W3C publication process. Not all documents listed are currently managed by the W3C I18n Activity.

Finalized publications

• Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals
  W3C Recommendation, 15 February 2005
  Architectural Specification providing authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web, building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Topics addressed include use of the terms.

• Internationalization Best Practices

  • Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content
    Provides HTML authors with best practice for developing internationalized HTML using XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, or XHTML 1.1, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects of CSS3. This document focuses specifically on advice about specifying the language of content.

• Internationalization Tag Set (ITS)
  Organized by data categories, the ITS set of elements and attributes supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.

• Internationalized Resource Identifiers
  IETF Proposed Standard, 25 January 2005
  IRIs expand the set of characters in URIs from a subset of US-ASCII to the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). They allow content developers and users to identify resources such as Web pages in their own languages. The IRI specification was in part developed by the Internationalization Working Group. The IRI specification will also provide a definitive reference for many W3C specifications - such as XML, RDF, XHTML and SVG.

• Requirements for the Internationalization of Web Services
  W3C Working Group Note, 16 November 2004
  Developed to help achieve worldwide usability for Web services, these requirements address the way internationalization options are exposed in Web services definitions, descriptions, messages, and discovery mechanisms.

• Ruby Annotation [Errata]
  W3C Recommendation, 31 May 2001
  "Ruby" are short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This specification defines markup for ruby, in the form of an XHTML module.

• Unicode in XML and Other Markup languages
  W3C Note, 13 June 2003
  This document contains guidelines on the use of the Unicode Standard in conjunction with markup languages such as XML.

• Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios
  W3C Working Group Note, 30 July 2004
  Describes internationalization usage patterns and scenarios for Web services. Provides additional guidance for implementers of Web service technologies, suggesting methods for dealing with general international interoperability issues in services and service descriptions. Provides a template for Web service designers to implement international capabilities in their services.

Work in progress

• Internationalization Best Practices (formerly called Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization)

  • Handling Right-to-left Scripts in XHTML and HTML Content [latest edit version] [history]
    Provides HTML authors with best practice for developing internationalized HTML using XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, or XHTML 1.1, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects of CSS3. This document provides advice for the use of markup and CSS to create pages for languages that use bidirectional text, such as Arabic and Hebrew. It attempts to counter many of the misunderstandings or over-complexities that currently abound. It also offers advice to those preparing content that will be localized into scripts that behave like Arabic and Hebrew.

  • Characters and Encodings [latest edit version] [history]
    Provides HTML authors with best practice for developing internationalized HTML using XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, or XHTML 1.1, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects of CSS3. This document focuses specifically on advice about character sets, encodings, and other character-specific matters.

  • Best Practices for XML Internationalization [latest edit version] [history]
    This document provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are internationalized properly. Following the best practices describes here allow both the developer of XML applications, as well as the author of XML content to create material in different languages.

• Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0:

  • Resource Identifiers [latest edit version] [history]
    Architectural Specification providing authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for the use of resource identifiers building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646.

  • Normalization [latest edit version] [history]
    Architectural Specification providing authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for early uniform normalization and string identity matching to improve interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web.

• CSS3 Modules:

  • Fonts
    Presents a set of properties allowing font specification by a user agent as well as additional font decoration properties like font effects, emphasis, smoothing, etc.

  • Line
    Presents a set of CSS line formatting properties. It also includes baseline alignment features as well as related functions like initial line and initial letter effect. It extends on the CSS 2 model.

  • Lists
    Proposes a large number of international list-style-type settings.

  • Ruby
    "Ruby" are short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This document proposes a set of CSS properties associated with the 'Ruby' elements. They can be used in combination with the Ruby elements of HTML.

  • Text
    Presents a set of text formatting properties for CSS3. Many of these properties already existed in CSS 2. Many of the new properties have been added to address basic requirements in international text layout, particularly for East Asian and bidirectional text.

  • Web Fonts
    Presents a set of properties allowing font description by a user agent. This specification is very close to the similar section in CSS 2. Only errata have been applied.

• Internationalization and Localization Markup Requirements [latest edit version] [history]
  When creating schemas (XML Schema, DTD, etc.), it is important to include constructs that meet the needs of content authors dealing with international audiences, and address the needs of the localization community. This document provides a list of key requirements to achieve such a goal. It will be used to provide a framework and direction for a detailed solution proposal (or set of proposals) to be developed later.

• Language Tags and Locale Identifiers [latest edit version] [history]
  Organized by data categories, the ITS set of elements and attributes supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.